5 Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your MVP

Building an Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is one of the smartest ways to validate your product idea, but it’s also one of the easiest things to get wrong.

When you're early in the product journey, there's excitement in the air. You want to build fast, impress users, and launch something tangible. But in the rush to ship, many forget what the "M" and the "V" actually stand for. Minimum. Viable. Not polished. Not feature-rich. Not perfect.

At its core, an MVP is a learning tool. It's how you test assumptions, validate demand, and figure out whether you're solving a problem people actually care about. But too often, MVPs turn into bloated, directionless builds that waste time and money, all while delivering very little insight. The goal isn’t just to launch. The goal is to learn something valuable that shapes what you build next.

That said, “minimum” doesn’t mean sloppy. Your MVP still needs to work. It needs to deliver a real slice of value to real users. It should be thoughtful, focused, and usable even if it’s rough around the edges. A broken or confusing experience won’t help you learn anything; it’ll just turn people away before you get the feedback you need.

In this article, we’ll walk through five of the most common mistakes teams make when building an MVP. These come from real stories, painful launches, rushed builds, and pivots that could’ve been avoided. If you want to build smarter and avoid costly detours or unnecessary headaches, these mistakes are worth understanding.

P.S - This post was inspired by a course that takes a deeper dive into smart MVP strategy and lean product thinking. You can check it out here.

Ready? Let’s get into it.

5 Mistakes to Avoid

If you can spot these early, and avoid them, you’ll be in a much stronger position to learn quickly, iterate smarter, and move closer to product-market fit

1. Building Too Much, Too Soon.

When you’re working on your first MVP, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of building everything, a signup flow, onboarding, dashboards, notifications, maybe even some AI sprinkled on top. After all, you want to impress your early users, right?

Here’s the problem: MVPs are meant to test assumptions, not to deliver perfection.

I’ve seen teams burn through months of development time trying to polish a product before putting it in front of a single user. By the time they launch, they’ve already over invested in features that haven’t been validated, and worse, they’re emotionally (and financially) attached to a solution that might not even solve a real problem.

The goal of your MVP is not to be impressive. It’s to be informative.

What’s the smallest thing you can build that helps you learn whether your core idea works? That’s your MVP. Strip it down.

Be ruthless. Focus on one problem, one user group, and one core value.

2. Solving a Problem Nobody Cares About.

Early in my product journey, I helped build an MVP that was sleek, functional, and honestly kind of cool. We were proud of it. It worked. It looked good. We thought we nailed it.

Except… no one really used it. Or when they did, they dropped off quickly. When we finally got around to asking users why, the answer was clear (and painful): the problem we were solving just wasn’t that important to them.

That lesson stuck. We had built a solution in search of a problem, and we didn’t even realize it. This is one of the most common mistakes I see early-stage founders and product teams make. Falling in love with the idea, not the problem.

But here’s the reality: users don’t adopt products because they’re clever or technically impressive. They adopt products that solve something real, painful, and ideally, urgent.

If your product disappeared tomorrow, would your users care? If not, you may be solving the wrong problem.

Before building anything, get brutally honest about the problem space. Talk to real users. Ask what frustrates them. Look at what they’re already doing to work around the issue. If they’re not actively trying to fix it themselves, there’s a good chance it’s not a priority.

3. Not Defining Success Metrics.

Let’s be honest, there’s something exciting about launching your MVP. You’ve spent time shaping the idea, maybe even wrangled a few no-code tools or burned through your dev budget, and now it’s live.

But here’s the question that’s crucial to ask before that moment: “How will we know if it’s actually working?”

This is where a lot of MVPs go off track. You launch, wait for the numbers to come in... and then realize you never actually defined what success looked like.

Are you measuring signups? Time spent in the product? Referrals? Feedback responses?

Without clear metrics, every post-launch conversation becomes a guessing game.

Your MVP should be tied to one or two specific learning goals and those goals need to be measurable. For example:

• If you're testing interest: track signups or landing page conversion.

• If you're testing usage: track activation or feature engagement.

• If you're testing monetisation: look at willingness to pay or pricing test conversions.

A good MVP doesn’t just gather data. It gathers the right kind of data to help you make a decision to pivot, persevere, or kill it.

So before you launch, ask yourself: What would success look like in two weeks? What behaviour or outcome would give us a clear answer?

4. Ignoring Customer Feedback.

You launch, check the numbers, and things seem okay. Some signups here, a few sessions there. You start to think, “Hey, we might be onto something.” But then weeks pass, and the usage flattens. People aren’t sticking around. You’re not sure why. And worse, you haven’t actually talked to anyone.

The thing is quantitative data tells you what users did while feedback tells you why they did it or didn’t. And that “why” is everything.

Do not assume that skipping customer conversations because you have the “numbers” will tell you the whole story. In the early days, your MVP is a living experiment. You need to be on the phone, in the inbox, or watching screen recordings of customer interactions to figure out what’s working and what’s missing.

Just because someone signed up doesn’t mean they understood the value. Just because they clicked a button doesn’t mean they got what they came for.

Talk to your users. Ask what confused them, what frustrated them, what delighted them. Even five honest conversations can reshape your product direction more than a month of metrics.

And if you’re not sure where to start?

Try this question: “What were you expecting to happen when you used [product name] and what actually happened?”

When you make customer feedback a core part of your MVP process, you reduce the risk of building features no one needs and increase your chances of getting it right the next time.

5. Designing for Scale Instead of Learning.

Early on, I worked with a team that spent weeks debating infrastructure decisions, cloud providers, database architecture, load balancing, as if we were about to support a million users on day one. Spoiler alert: we weren’t.

It’s easy to fall into this mindset. We want our MVP to feel “real,” and we don’t want to rebuild things later. But here’s the thing: if you’re focused on scaling before you’ve validated demand, you’re solving the wrong problem.

Your MVP is an experiment, not a launchpad for hyper growth.

At the MVP stage, speed and learning matter more than long-term architecture. Use duct tape. Use no-code. Use manual processes behind the scenes. You can optimise later, if there’s something worth scaling.

Premature scaling wastes time and energy that should be spent understanding your users. You’ll slow down progress chasing problems you don’t have yet. Validate value first, then earn the right to build for scale.

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: your MVP is not the end goal, It’s the beginning of your learning process. It’s a tool designed to test assumptions, gather real feedback, and guide you toward product-market fit with as little waste as possible.

Avoiding these mistakes can mean the difference between a directionless release and a sharp, insight-driven experiment. When you treat your MVP as a learning opportunity rather than a mini launch, you stay agile, focused, and responsive to what users actually need.

So, take a moment to reflect: which of these mistakes might be showing up in your own MVP journey right now?

Be honest, revisit your assumptions, and lean into learning.

For a deeper dive into how to build MVPs that actually move the needle, check out the course that inspired this article - Planning and Building your MVP